Well, look at it like this...

"The frogman-commandos apparently hit all three men in the head with simultaneous single shots fired from the deck of a US destroyer nearby, having earlier arrived on the scene by parachuting into the sea."

Well, that's nice.

Yeah, I always like to be told what I'm doing wrong by someone who thinks his startup's going to steal a worthwhile amount of business from Amazon -- of course, that's the startup he started in the wake of the collapse of his previous startup, which was supposed to steal a worthwhile amount of business from Google. I am beginning to think that maybe there's a credibility issue here, you guys.

Dziuba might have a pair of programmer's balls the size of boulders -- I'm sure he does, and that he keeps them in a special room in his house where he goes sometimes late at night to look at them -- but Milo.com? Pressflip.com? I've flushed better business plans than these. Can maybe next time the Reg needs a periodic ranter, y'all pick out somebody who can be taken a little bit seriously?

I can't believe...

Wow what a joke

Srsly, it's shit like this that keeps me away from Apple products. Great hardware, great software, management incompetent to tie its own fuckin' shoes. (Which is why all those VP types wear penny loafers -- they're no longer clever enough to manage boots on their own.)

@Kenny Millar

Uh, that's kind of the point -- Heathrow gets lots of noise complaints, but the orbiter wouldn't generate any because it doesn't make any engine noise at all during landing. It was one of those 'joke' things, you know, that...ah, never mind.

"Destination" -- OR IS IT???

If you follow the link to the transcript, you'll find that they've corrected the typo from 'destruction' to 'destination', and explained the change in an asterisked footnote.

Obviously, though, this is merely the US Govt's attempt to fig-leaf their actual policy, accidentally leaked, of murdering everyone who comes through a US airport and has a sniffle or a cold; people who sneeze will be summarily judged guilty of spreading bioterror weapons and be shot on sight.

Garlic sauce?

Who doesn't have that now? I mean, Papa John's was pretty much the first big chain in the US to put it in with their pizzas, but now everybody does, so who needs Domino's with their institutionalized bigotry and their lousy, mass-produced, snot-caked pies?

D'you think?

"...d'you think there is any plausible relationship between this ["indigo child" nonsense] and the quite genuine discovery that an increasing number of humans are now being born with a changed gene for a protein used in the brain which may give real advantage?"

Mmm, chicken Kiev.

They're redoing Live Search? That's nice, I guess. Maybe they can make it not suck quite so much, but I still don't think anyone'll bother to use it, except those few poor misfortunates who haven't yet figured out how to put Google in IE's search box.

Ugh.

HTML 5? Really?

Since when does a hypertext markup language need a local data cache? W3C need to change the name of the standard -- what they're doing might, y'know, involve HTML as a presentation language, but it sounds like what they're actually *designing* is a Web 2.0 application platform.

Well that's a shock

Re: Grr

"If he owns a cat, he deserves to have his laptop melt."

At a party, this would be the sign for me to stand up and back away slowly whilst carefully avoiding any sudden movements. However, as I'm not within range of any physical harm that might result from mishandling such obvious insanity, I confess I'm curious: Richard, what's your problem with cats?

God almighty

Well, they can't do any worse than Kurt Russell, I guess.

Oh, who am I kidding? Tom Cruise as R. J. McReady!

Mine's the one with the revolver in the pocket -- don't worry, it's only got one round in it. Oh, and don't mind it if you hear a loud bang from the street outside in the next minute or two, it'll just be me going.

Re: "Non-physical coercion"

"If I tell my ex-girlfriend, who doesn't have anywhere to spend the night, that she can stay with me, but only if she gives me a blowjob, is that coercion?"

Yes.

"What if I put off the deadline for repaying a debt in return for sexual services, when the person doesn't have the money to pay immediately?"

Yes, that's coercion too.

"In the former case I give them a choice: if they choose to sleep with me it's because _they_ think that sleeping with me is less bad than having their car scratched."

That's trivializing the issue.

"If publishing the photos/videos is not illegal, then I am perfectly entitled to do so, and I am perfectly entitled to accept a bribe of sexual services in return for not doing so, surely, at least in jurisdictions where prostitution is not illegal."

And that's extortion, which is a separate felony in the United States. Unless you're arguing that extortion shouldn't be a crime, I fail to see the point you're trying to make.

And I'd dearly love to know why so many people on this comment thread are so goddam anxious to exonerate an adult who procured sexual services from children under false pretenses and by dint of threats. Last I checked, that's one of the filthiest acts it is possible for a human being to perpetrate -- so why the chorus of specious defense from the cheap seats?

I think I see a problem -

"Foreign Secretary David Miliband has refused to release documents requested by Guantanomo Bay resident Binyam Mohamed and denied that his decision was based on fear of US reprisals[....]Foreign Office lawyers told the court that if they were then the US would stop giving the UK intelligence information, which would put UK citizens at risk."

It's not April 1, but...

@John

'"can we say "Expectation of privacy"[?]'

In a word -- no. Given the way we treat under-18s who take nudey snaps of themselves, what leads you to believe that under-18s in America would have the privilege of what we laughingly call a 'right to privacy'?

Besides which, American primary and secondary schools operate in a special legal situation which severely curtails even the few scanty rights American minors are considered to possess. There's precedent that kids in school don't have a right to privacy in their possessions, so I'm sure it was perfectly legal for Ms. Longnose to go ferreting through her student's phone.

It's, uh, er, um, uh...

Seriously, y'all! First, spend five minutes thinking ahead over what you're going to say and do while the camera's running, so that those of us trying to get an early peek at what's probably going to be our next phone don't have to listen to a bunch of "um" and "er" and "uh". It's not hard!

Oops!

That went well

No, really. In the US you'd be tasered twice before they got the cuffs on you, then you'd spend a week in jail before they finally got off their thumb and cut you loose, and then you'd be expected to pay for the privilege. Then you'd come home to find that your neighbors wouldn't be budged from believing that you're actually a child-molesting Al Qaeda heroin dealer, and the next morning you'd go to work only to find that you'd been fired for unscheduled absence. (And don't forget, being fired for cause disqualifies you from collecting unemployment benefits!)

Two questions

1) How did four people in a row fail to notice that the phrase 'Roman Catholic' was not followed by the word 'priest'? Do 'priest' and 'daredevil' suddenly look exactly the same to every English speaker on the planet except me? I know it's Friday, but -- what, you can't even be bothered to waste your employer's time properly?

2) You'd think the guy would've brought some kind of propulsion device with him. Or, you know, made sure to launch from a place where the wind wasn't going to carry him out to sea. (Belgium? Luxembourg? Another of those useless little postage-stamp European principalities? They're all well inland, I believe.)

But, then, if he couldn't use the GPS unit he brought with him, I guess there's already sort of a pattern of bad judgement and insufficient foresight being established.

@Richard: NT versions

(Except that Wikipedia's list of Windows versions calls Windows 7 NT 6.1.something. I don't know whether that's because it's currently in beta, or whether the GA version of Windows 7 will still claim to be NT version 6.1. So I have no real idea.)

'Within three hours of posting this story...'

Ah, the virtual Zippo

One of the things that helped scare me off the iPhone. I looked at that -- that and the lightsaber thingy, I should note -- and thought, y'know, it's like putting a cute little state-of-the-art paper shredder in my pocket, then every so often taking it out and using it to turn a few dollar bills into so much confetti.

"Air Marshal Jock Stirrup"

See, that's how I know this is a humor article. Nice to see the carrion eaters in editorial are allowing you to broaden your scope, Mr Page, but work on the names next time, eh? Something like that's just a dead giveaway.

@Rob Aley

They may be better for the environment, but they're not better for *me*, and the people who strongly back them seem far too high on saving the world to get around very often to noting that if you accidentally break one of these things, you create a significant poisoning hazard. Not that that's different from other fluorescents, but I'm not fond of the way people sell these things as the best invention since sliced bread, and never actually bother to mention that they're not without risk. (But, hey, who cares how many pets and kids get mercury poisoning as long as we save the world, right?)

Apple won the home?

With ~10% market share just now, and that being the highest they've ever managed -- how do you figure? If anything, it seems that, until recently, Apple's desperately struggled just to keep from losing the single-digit market share they already had. How does this work out to a 'win'?

"I don't get all the Cloverfield hate"

I guess it's a question of taste, but I thought it was frankly crap, between whatsername blowing up for no reason, the fact that the monster itself was never even *slightly* explained -- I mean, okay, something goes unexpectedly smashing through New York -- no great loss there, by the way -- then I suppose I can see how, at least for a couple hours, things would be totally confused and everybody would basically just be running for their lives and not stopping to figure out anything. I can see that being realistic but that isn't the same as saying it'd make a movie I want to watch -- I mean, okay, verite and that, but let's try to explain *something* so I can feel like I haven't wasted my time on a bunch of painfully disjointed action sequences that not only don't make sense, but will *never* make sense, because the director didn't bother to provide enough information about anything to even *begin* to be useful.

And why is it necessary for every single movie that comes out of Hollywood any more to be peopled with these inhumanly perfect physical specimens? I mean, when was the last time you saw a movie where somebody had a mole, or, or a pimple -- *any* kind of facial eruption or asymmetry at all -- that *didn't* have an entire subplot revolving around it? Cloverfield loses points there too -- you don't go through a frantic escape, refugee pickup, friend-exploding bit, followed by more incomprehensible nonsense, and *still* have perfect hair. Unless, of course, you're in a completely crap movie.

Now, I don't want to sound like I'm just entirely out to run the movie down. True, I can demonstrate that Abrams has never in his miserable, misbegotten life ever even *worked on* anything that was better than "marginally watchable", with half a point's grace awarded in the case of "Regarding Henry", which frankly has to have been a fluke and was a long time ago besides. But I have to say that there are some good things about "Cloverfield", to wit: for one thing, it's a lot quicker to watch than "Lost", and the payoff seems to be about the same; they both seem to be about equally incomprehensible, and neither seems to have any characters at all who're even vaguely approaching the neighborhood of 'sympathetic', but at least it takes a lot less time to get through a feature-length movie than through four increasingly self-indulgent, reentrant, and frankly appalling seasons of what even those Wachowski assholes might recognize as a masturbatorily piss-poor attempt to take a brain-dead pile of limp story-spaghetti and tart it up with the cheap marinara sauce of a hard-core pothead's excuse for philosophy -- it's, like, totally deep, man, you just don't understand, you know?

There was probably another good thing I was going to say about Cloverfield, but I can't remember what it was.

Oh yeah! He somehow managed to leave out most all the stoner philosophy in that one -- no mystic mandalas or Yin-Yang symbols or trigrams or what-have-you, just good old...well, incomprehensible garbage, I guess. But at least it didn't drag into itself a bunch of innocently bystanding symbols which might actually at one time have *had* some kind of real significance, before being sucked dry by our modern reality with its rapacious appetite for anything and everything which might for one ephemeral instant afford it the illusion of meaning. And, of course, one of the chief leaders and standard bearers of this vampiric hologram in which we live is Hollywood, here effigied in the person of JJ Abrams, who has finally, after a long and effortful career working his way up to the top of Hollywood, managed to shit all over something that people other than Abrams and his drooling-moron fans care about -- the trailer linked into the article is sufficient evidence, I think, of that.

Re: Big ravine thing

"Could the ravine not be the trench left by the big laser thing from the start of S2 of Enterprise?"

No, that was in Florida and points south.

[ http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/The_Expanse_(episode) ]

So my question is just this: why is JJ Abrams still walking around alive?

I mean, I don't expect hardcore Lost fans to do anything about the four years of their lives they've wasted on that asshole's disjointed opium-and-crystal-meth fantasies; the fact that they've stuck with the show that long proves they're totally sad and can't be expected to act in their own best interests.

But what about the rest of us? You know, the people with taste? The people who won't allow any random self-enthralled Hollywood jerkoff to squirt his acrid asparagus-tasting load onto our tonsils, just for the privilege of pretending to be part of some big secret that would give our lives meaning if only it wasn't all made up in the dubiously competent brain of a rich twenty-something coke fiend while he was getting a blowjob from a $1000-an-hour call girl. Look at what our inaction has wrought! How did we ever let it come to this?